C3 Focus Areas

Colorado Highlighted Project - Turnaround Leadership Program

Posted on July 28, 2014

The Central
Comprehensive Center at the University of Oklahoma, in partnership with the
West Comprehensive Center at WestEd, is supporting the Colorado Department of
Education in building state leadership capacity, increasing academic
performance, and expanding high quality learning options for all its students,
districts, and schools, with a focus on turning around the lowest-performing
districts and schools. Colorado joined
the University of Virginia (UVA) Darden School of Business/Curry School of
Education Partnership for Leaders in Education (PLE) in 2011 as a member of the
Southwest Turnaround Leadership Consortium.
In addition to Colorado, four other states (Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and
New Mexico) are members of this consortium started by the former Southwest
Comprehensive Center at WestEd in 2010.
Three cohorts of school, district, and state leaders have worked in this
program with a fourth cohort in the planning stages for Summer 2014. Oklahoma also recently joined the
consortium. Oklahoma, as well as
consortium member New Mexico, is supported by the South Central Comprehensive
Center at the University of Oklahoma.

The UVA PLE
Turnaround Specialist Program uses a systemic approach by working with school-,
district-, and state-level leadership teams to help them build the internal
capacity necessary to support and sustain effective school turnarounds. The program uses innovative thinking from
business and education to address the challenges and needs of education leaders
that are in charge of turning around our nation’s lowest-performing
schools. Participants in the program commit
to completing an intense two-year program that focuses on two components:
high-impact school leaders and district capacity/conditions that support
change. Positive results have been shown
already; schools in this program have experienced substantial improvements in
performance on standardized tests. This
past year, the program was expanded to include a strand specifically designed
for SEA executive teams to strengthen their organizational capacity to lead
statewide improvement and reform initiatives.

The Central
Comprehensive Center at the University of Oklahoma and its partner WestEd will
continue to support Colorado's state-level leadership who attend this program
alongside district and school leader participants. The intermediate outcomes will be an
improvement of instructional practices and highly effective turnaround
leadership for all Colorado districts and schools. The long-term outcome
will be improved student learning.

For
more information and resources, visit the Central Comprehensive Center website atwww.c3ta.org.